Ryan Barrett's blog

The Longest Journey slow on Windows XP

I
recently played The Longest Journey
(reviews)
a few weeks ago, and I loved it. It’s a standard
point-and-click adventure game, but the world and characters are surprisingly
immersive, and the story is amazing so far.

Unfortunately, it took me a while to make it happy on Windows XP. It installed
and ran, but it was incredibly slow, often only a few frames per second. I was
surprised, since it’s an older game, and I run it on a Thinkpad
T40
with an ATI Radeon 9000
Mobility, which should
be more than enough power. I tried all the options in the launcher, including 16
vs. 32 bit color, low-detail models, W-buffer and force single buffer, and even
Windows 95 and 98/ME compatibility
mode. No
luck. I was stumped.

Finally, I tried turning 3D acceleration off by unchecking the “Enable 3D
Acceleration” checkbox. The framerate suddenly turned silky smooth. Maybe TLJ
uses an older version of DirectX that the ATI driver doesn’t support well? Who
knows. I’m just happy it works!